Abstract

In this letter, we report a first-principles calculation which is well correlated to experiment on the role of nitrogen at interface in negative bias temperature instability(NBTI). Our calculation shows that nitrogen’s lone pair electrons can trap dissociated hydrogen species more easily than oxygen. After trapping, a positive charge complex is formed and weakening of bond strength is observed at trapping site. Furthermore, as nitrogen concentration goes beyond 8 at. %, the neighboring effect from nitrogen starts to play a role in further degradation. The interfacial nitrogen dependence of the NBTI-induced defect generation is found to coincide with that of the -trapping reaction energy. Eventually, a linear correlation is found between the reaction energy and the defect generation. This provides an insight into nitrogen-enhanced NBTI.